by J. K. Wise
“You could, if you want to be a coward.”
“Hey, I didn’t ask for this. I don’t even understand it. I feel like Alec asked me as a joke, and everyone is waiting for the punchline.” I can hear her sigh through the phone, and I imagine her face, eyes rolled up to the sky, frustrated by my freakishness. “I need your help. This love life stuff is easy for you. I don’t even know how to get through the day without saying something stupid or insulting someone on accident.”
“Easy? Nothing is easy for me. Why do you think I’m sleeping on my Aunt’s couch, because my love life is so easy?”
I sink a little. “I’m sorry, Cor. I know things aren’t easy. You can stay here, you know.”
“Yeah, Whitney would just love that.” Whitney, the girlfriend.
Corr’s super-Catholic old-school parents kicked her out of the house last week when she told them that she’s in love with a girl. I don’t know how they can be so dim. I’ve been best friends with Corrina since Kindergarten, and I’ve always known that she wasn’t into guys.
“I don’t get why Whitney hates me so much. I’ve only talked to her a few times ever.”
“Well, you probably said something stupid or insulted her on accident,” she says.
“Ha. You laugh, but I probably did.” I try to remember anything I’ve ever said to Whitney. I remember nothing.
“I’m not laughing. She’s jealous of you. She doesn’t want us to be friends.”
I sink a little lower. “That’s stupid. And you better not stop being my friend. You’re the only person who gets me.”
It gets loud on Corrina’s side of the phone, kid screams, yells, laughs, cries from the loud army of nieces and nephews that Corrina watches for her Tia. “I gotta go,” she says over the craziness. “Just tell him, Mel. But don’t wait. You should give him a chance to ask someone else if you don’t want to be his date.”
She hangs up, and I throw the phone onto my side table and roll over again. I’ll text him tomorrow. Texting is like underwater communication. No sound. Just the message, like this game Corrina and I used to play underwater when we were kids, pantomiming tea parties. I would close my eyes underwater, even with goggles on. I still do that. My coach yells at me when she sees my eyes closed in the underwater film.
I feel like I’m dreaming already; I’m so tired. My bed is a raft, and I’m rolling back and forth, rolling on the waves. There is a peace to the movement, like my perfect place underwater, and then, everything goes crazy. There’s a loud, groaning noise, and my eyes shoot open. The noise roars louder and louder, and the posters on my wall areshaking. One of the posters tears in half as the wall bucks, and I scream. My heart pounds loudly everyday during a workout, but that’s nothing compared to right now. The window moans as the glass folds impossibly. Without thinking, I duck and then, holy shit! The whole window explodes into the room, glass flying everywhere, and I’m on my feet and running into the hall.
Mom and Dad are already standing in the hall.
“It’s an earthquake,” Dad says.
Earthquake. That sounds so ridiculous, I have to laugh. Dad stands, taut. The ground rolls under us, books crash from the shelf to the floor, and the clock falls from the wall. He says it again: “It’s an earthquake,” and his voice rises. He steps quickly in one direction, then another, ready to act but unsure what action to take. I run down the hall, and my parents follow me.
When we burst out the front door, the rolling has stopped. Standing in the desert, barefoot in my nightshirt, I reel with the possibility of movement and stillness.
The ground shakes again, and I scream. I watch as our mailbox, solid concrete turned to dust in seconds. My body rocks, unsteady on my feet, and I fall to the ground. My heart pounds crazily, and I crouch in the shaking dirt for another minute with the desert sky stretching over my head. The movement stops. I look wildly around the yard one direction, then the other. Mom keeps saying, “Oh my god, oh my god,“ her voice growing faster, and her pitch climbing with each repetition.
“Are you okay?” Dad asks as he bounds over to me.
“Yeah, dad, I’m fine,” I say, my own voice quaking in the night. Dad looks like he wants to hug me, but I can’t stand still. I turn and walk out to the street and look back at the house. Our large ranch-style house is off the road, and prickly pear cacti grow as tall as trees around our place.
As quickly as a blink, things are normal again, except for the mailbox.
Oh my god. I hope Corrina’s okay. “Can I go inside and get my phone?” I ask Dad. He shakes his head, no.
“No. An earthquake. That’s what they said this morning on the news. Stay out of the house, they said, after an earthquake.There could be gas leaks or the ceiling could be unsafe or the water pipes broken or any number of things,” he rambles. I don’t think he’s really talking to me. I turn away and keep walking to the street. I can’t stop shaking my head. Earth-quake, earth-quake.
Usually, I love walking through the dark. It’s like being underwater without goggles, all details impossible to discern. Tonight, though, it is beyond strange to be in my nightshirt, walking barefoot through the gravel under the half moon. Sound travels in the flat, open desert, and far off, I hear the sounds of disaster layered on top of one another, first one siren, then another, one closer and one further away, a swaying symphony, easier or more difficult to hear if the desert wind is blowing in my ears or not.
When I look to my left, our neighbor stands in the middle of the street a few yards down the way.
“Mrs. Portillo?” I call out, and I walk closer. “Are you okay?”
She nods her head yes, and then shakes no before nodding again. Then, she answers. “I thought I was having a dream, and then the picture fell off the wall, and my drink sloshed in my glass. And then it was over, or at least, I hope it’s over. I felt another rumble just when I was walking out here, just a second ago.” Even in the silver moonlight, I can see the flush on her cheeks.
“Is Jared home?” I ask.
“No, he’s out. And Nick is out of town,” she answers. Jared’s her son, and Nick is her husband, Mr. Portillo, who always smiles and says hi to me, unlike Mrs. Portillo on most days.
Jared and I grew up together, playing in our backyards and swimming in each other’s pools. He gives me rides to school sometimes, and he always says hi to me in the hallway, which floors Corrina every time. He doesn’t have brothers or sisters either. He’s really gorgeous, for sure, but he’s also a nice guy, which is unusual, I think, to be both.
Janet Portillo is close to the same age as Mom, and she drives this big, light-blue Mercedes. When I see her driving around the neighborhood, she always wears these bright silk scarves and hides her eyes behind huge sunglasses. She seems kind of phony to me. Tonight, she isn’t wearing any makeup or anything. Standing in the moonlight, barefoot in her bathrobe, she looks almost like my grandma.
“You’re alone? Do you want to come hang out with us?” I offer.
“No, I’m fine. My house seems fine, and Jared will be home soon. Thanks, though.”
“Okay, well, just wanted to make sure you’re okay.” We face each other, fifteen and fifty in our PJs. “All the stuff fell off our shelves.”
“A part of my ceiling fell down. Everything was flying around, especially in the kitchen, a lot of breaking plates and glasses.” Mrs. Portillo’s voice shakes, maybe from the chilly desert air, or maybe just the nerves of this night. Closer now, a loud siren cuts through the night. “I guess I should go inside and take a look.”
“I don’t know. My dad said it wasn’t safe. He wouldn’t let me go back inside. Something about gas leaks or explosions or something.”
Mrs. Portillo’s eyes widen in the dim moonlight.
“Where is your dad?”
I nod back toward the house.
“I’ll go ask him about gas leaks,” Mrs. Portillo says. She squeezes through a break in the prickly pear fence.
I sit on a boulder in the front yard. My mind races. Were people hurt in Tucson? What does our house look like inside? The only damage that I can see is the pulverized mailbox and a gutter trim that is hanging down over the garage. Did that happen tonight? Everything was so violent for that one minute, but the house seems okay from the outside.
But what about Josie on swim team who lives on the second story of the condo complex across the street from school? Or what if people were driving and the road split apart? It’s hard not to imagine the worst. I want to call Corrina.
Maybe Dad will let me back inside the house. Maybe the coast is clear from gas leaks and structural damage ghouls. My parents are constantly afraid of stuff that seems the least possible things to actually kill them.
I walk around the house. The awning that stretches across the backyard is still standing. The yellow flag-looking shade shelters the moonlight, creating a shadow where my dad is standing with Mrs. Portillo. We’ve been neighbors with the Portillos for my whole life. We’re the only two families in the neighborhood who haven’t subdivided our our slices of the desert. We go to block parties together, and Jared and I walk back home when our parents get tipsy and obnoxious.
So it shouldn’t be weird that Dad is holding Mrs. Portillo’s hand. She’s still shaking, and it’s just like Dad to comfort a friend. I walk a little closer to ask if I can go inside now.
But then, Dad looks up and sees me. Mrs. Portillo follows his eyes to where I’m standing. She inhales really sharply and pulls her hand away from Dad’s. That isn’t normal.
No, it’s actually really weird, the weirdest of weird things on this crazy night when the ground shook out of the blue. Tonight, there is no normal.
Chapter Eight
Definitely Not Good
My arms shake sometimes after football practice, but nothing like this. Tonight is way worse. I’m gripping the peeling steering wheel of my Honda to stop the shakes, hurting with a deep-inside, can’t-be-fixed kind of pain.
My street is dark and empty as I turn into the neighborhood in the foothills. A few lights are on in houses, so the power must be working around here. I slow down a little as I get closer to my house. Phones aren’t working, and I haven’t gotten through to Mom. Dad’s out of town, so she’s by herself. My teeth click in a rhythm. The cold wind blows against my face, and loud metal music keeps me focused. One thing at a time, I think. Concentrate. Turn the wheel left, push the brake pedal. Breathe.
Once I’m in the half-circle of my driveway, I throw the car in park and jump out onto the gravel. I make it up the stone steps to my house in three strides, but then, I stop, back up, and look hard.
It looks okay. It looks exactly the same, actually. The front light is on, and it’s like nothing happened. My house is standing, the windows unbroken, the tan stucco intact.
I walk through the dark, wood-floored hallway, following the grey flicker of the TV in my parents’ room. Mom sleeps on the leather couch next to her bed. I stand in the dark and watch the reports on CNN, picture after picture of collapsed buildings all over Tucson. The worst images are from downtown. A reporter stands in front of that house on College Avenue. Behind her, a small green car is all fucked up, crushed in with red tiles that slid off the roof. My stomach pitches, and I almost fall to the floor as I look away from the TV.
That car. I helped the paramedics pull two girls out of that car a few hours ago. The girls were wrecked from the car’s collapse and all slashed up from the shattered windshield. Glass stuck into them, and their blood made trails through the shimmer of ground glass on their tanned skin. We laid their bodies out on plastic sheets. I don’t know if they lived or not. The reporter doesn’t mention the girls as she motions to the mess behind her.
It’s an impossible thing that I’m watching on TV, like a horror movie with actors and fake scenery. But it isn’t a movie. It’s real, and I was there. And now, I’m back in my house that stands here like nothing happened when I’m ripped up and slashed on the inside. I want to cry and scream and hug my mom like a kid, but what is that going to change?
Mom snores under a throw blanket on her couch, and I shake her gently. “C’mon Mom, you should get in your bed.”
She opens her eyes and starts to cry when she sees me. “Jared honey,” she says, wiping her tears with the blanket.
“I’m okay, mom. Are you?”
She nods. I see the empty bottle on her bathroom counter, and there’s a wine glass stained red on the nightstand. She won’t stop crying as she sits up.
“The house is okay, right?” I ask.
“There’s a little damage to the back wall, and some of the pictures are down. But I’m fine,” she says, almost whispering, although there is no one to wake in the house. “The phones don’t work.”
“I know, mom, I tried to call.”
“Where have you been?” she asks.
“The Carters’ place.” I don’t know why I don’t tell her the truth about where I was, but the lie comes out easily. “None of us knew it was a big deal until we turned on the radio. We were out back.”
“Was Stina with you? Is Ryan’s house okay? Did they have any damage over there?”
I shake my head, but I can’t look at her.
“Yeah, Stina’s fine,” I say, even though I don’t know if that’s true. “Everything’s okay up there.” I lie again.
I look at the TV. Tucson Shakes, it says at the bottom of the screen, surrounded by a fiery logo. The camera pans to the left and focuses on the rescuers who are pulling layers of collapsed stone away with their hands, fighting to rescue trapped people inside of some club before fire reaches the building.
“Is this really happening?” I ask flatly. My question isn’t really for mom, but she answers anyway.
“Oh, honey, we’re fine. Our home is fine.” She sits up and kisses me on the cheek before I can skirt away from her. She gathers up the chenille blanket and wipes a few more tears from her face. “Go to bed. I’m sure everything will seem better in the morning.”
I shut my mom’s bedroom door behind me, but I can’t go to bed yet. It’s still dark outside, but the sun will come up soon. I switch off the front lights and walk out to my car. The window is still open from when I let the cold air stun my face on my drive back from hell. I grab a pack of smokes out of the dash. I’m not really a smoker, just a couple on weekends, usually around the bonfires out at Carter’s place. The closest building out there is yards away, so basically, the only thing that could crush a person is a cactus.
Christina, my girlfriend, was there, waiting for me to show up.
I lean against the car and light my smoke with matches from my pocket. The stars are stark in the black sky. I can see my breath, it’s so cold tonight, and I keep exhaling and exhaling, blowing out all the air in my lungs. I can’t tell when smoke ends and see-my-breath starts.
“Hey Jared.” The voice behind the prickly-pear jars me, and I almost swallow my cigarette. Melanie from next door walks out of the darkness through the gap in the cactus. My heart, which was starting to steady, races again from the jolt.
“Holy shit, don’t scare me like that. What are you doing out here?”
“Did you feel it?” she asks.
My forehead hurts from tensing up my face. I nod.
“Yeah, Mel, of course. Everyone felt it. They probably felt it in California,” I say to her, but I try to be gentle. Melanie’s tough in the water or on the track, but away from that, there is something sort of fragile about h
er, ever since way back.
“Are you watching the news? Have you seen downtown?” she asks. Her eyes are huge, and she’s wrapped in a shaggy pink robe that seems ridiculously big for her small body.
I nod again.“Yeah, my mom was watching it just now.”
“I talked to your mom right after it happened. She’s okay, right?”
I’m about to answer when Melanie opens her mouth to say something else and frowns before she gets the words out.
“What, Mel?”
She hiccups a little, choking back something. Melanie’s always a little strange even in normal life, but now, she looks like she’s going to faint or throw up or something. “Are you sure you’re okay? I don’t think I can handle it if you fall over.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m just really freaked out.”
“I hear you.” I take another drag of my cigarette.
She looks away. “You smoke?” she asks, her nose wrinkling.
“Not really.” I look up at the stars again and close my eyes. My adrenaline is fading, but then, like one of the aftershocks I’ve felt all night, it hits me again. I open my eyes quickly, but it’s too late.
I’m back there again, and I see the beer in my cup rippling, the waves rolling through the stained carpet on the floor. The roar and the crack of the beam splitting just a few feet away from me.
I stumble back a few feet, and my car catches me before I fall all the way back into the dirt driveway. Melanie steps forward and reaches out her hand like she’s going to catch me even though she’s too many feet away. Leaning against my car, I look at her hand and I want to take it, to let someone catch me, to have someone break my fall.
“Everything is not going to be better in the morning. Everything is going to be much, much worse.”
Mel nods solemnly, and she lowers her arm, her eyes still on me, big and blue. “Where were you?” she asks. “When it happened? Because here, it didn’t seem like that big of a thing. I mean, our bookcase fell over, and there are cracks here and there, but then, on TV, it’s like Armageddon.”